These two talented and generous musicians are once again playing to raise money, this time for the benefit of the Local Living Venture. I hope you will come and listen to their beautiful music and support the tireless work of the Local Living Venture. The suggested donation is $10 and reservations are not required.

“With a real ‘when music was music’ vibe running throughout, this singer/songwriter in bluesy trappings hits it out of the park with just the right sound & fury.”
~ Chris Spector, Midwest Record, Lake Zurich, IL

“Whatever the styles, Mary Ann’s vocals will snare you with their honest emotion.”
~ Music Morsels Reviews

Tas Cru’s new album Simmered & Stewed is a collection of previously recorded material that has been re-mastered with new instrumentation, backup vocals, and a new sound. Like a fine wine, or a delicious stew that has mellowed over the years, Simmered and Stewed proves that some songs get better age. It is available on the VizzTone label.

Saturday, June 3
7:30 PM

Robin McClellan’s
(The Hermitage)

$10 Admission

Alex is coming back for another concert! Everyone who plays here brings something unique and for me, Alex superpower is his songwriting. Not to diminish his skills on the guitar and his great pipes, but Alex is a master storyteller. Walking confidently in the footsteps of Bill Morrisey, Greg Brown, John Hartford, and, of course, Stan Rogers, he captures people in their relationship with each other and the place they live.

Since his appearance last November, Alex has recorded a live album at the legendary Caffè Lena’s, scheduled for release in mid-July. He is also on track for 200 shows this year though that hasn’t stopped him from preparing for a new studio album, “Fuel, Air,
Compression, Spark.”

Alex grew up in Long Lake, in the heart of New York’s Adirondack Park, and his music strives first and foremost to echo the culture of that area. He builds songs from a blend of traditional folk harmony and strikingly modern lyrics, confronting today’s most pressing issues with grace while paying homage to the musical tradition of the region.

Alex’ characters, though fictional, live and breathe a balance between beauty and imperfection. His stories draw on the triumphs and hardships of friends, relatives, and neighbors near and far, and he has worked tirelessly to carry the music of northern New York to audiences nationwide.

I hope you will join me in celebrating his return!

Robin

“Alex is a wonderful poetic writer who captures words full of meaning, matching them with creative music that creeps quietly into the past at the same time as dancing with the present, and sneaking a peek at the future.”

– Bob Everhart, Country Music News International

“Alex is a natural storyteller with a rich voice who is creating poignant songs rooted in the heritage of his Adirondack home.”

Program

Potsdam-based Quartet Z is delighted to welcome guest artists to present a unique program of chamber music. I am equally delighted to welcome you to join all of them for a program of music that encompasses a wide span of both time and space. Benjamin Britten’s Phantasy for oboe and strings (1931) was written in London and takes the listener on a delightful journey within the piece. The Walls of Morlais Castle, written by Adirondack-based composer Hilary Tann, was inspired by the contrasts between the ruins of Castle Morlais (in Wales) and the surrounding landscape. Finally, the unique instrumentation of Quartet Z will bring a new perspective to Telemann’s Quartet in d minor from Tafel-Musik II (published in Hamburg in 1773). This jovial work, somewhat reminiscent of a dance suite, is regarded as one of Telemann’s most innovative works.

Mary Ann Casale and Tas Cru

House Concert Benefit

forLocal Living Venture

Saturday, November 12 at 7:30 PM

These two talented and generous musicians are once again playing to raise money, this time for the benefit of the Local Living Venture. I hope you will come and listen to their beautiful music and support the tireless work of the Local Living Venture. The suggested donation is $10 and reservations are not required.

“You can’t put a label on her music. It is blues & folk with a fine dose of soul & jazz. Twelve fine songs that are worth listening to.”
Since they last played here, Mary Ann has released her CD “Restless Heart” to critical acclaim:

~ Eric Campfens, Barn Owl Blues, The Netherlands

“With a real ‘when music was music’ vibe running throughout, this singer/songwriter in bluesy trappings hits it out of the park with just the right sound & fury.”
~ Chris Spector, Midwest Record, Lake Zurich, IL

“Whatever the styles, Mary Ann’s vocals will snare you with their honest emotion.”
~ Music Morsels Reviews

Tas Cru’s new album Simmered & Stewed is a collection of previously recorded material that has been re-mastered with new instrumentation, backup vocals, and a new sound. Like a fine wine, or a delicious stew that has mellowed over the years, Simmered and Stewed proves that some songs get better age. It is available on the VizzTone label and releases Nov. 12th. Pre-release copies will be available at this show!

Alex Smith

Saturday, November 5
7:30 PM

Admission: $10

Sanfordville

As Alex Smith winds down his packed fair weather tour—performing over 150 concerts across the US and as far away as Vienna and Barcelona—he is returning home to the North Country. And he has agreed to play here at the Hermitage! I’m really looking forward to hearing what he’s put together over his touring season and I’m sure he’ll be playing some songs off his new album, Close to Home.

For those of you who haven’t had the privilege to hear Alex, this is a great place to do it. Alex is a lot like Stan Rogers whose sonorous baritone voice and moving lyrics captured life in Cape Breton and the Maritimes. Both of them are young (tragically Stan died before he turned 34 in 1983), both write about a sense of place, and both bring a sense of wisdom and authenticity usually only gained over many years.

Alex grew up in Long Lake, in the heart of New York’s Adirondack Park, and his music strives first and foremost to echo the culture of that area. He builds songs from a blend of traditional folk harmony and strikingly modern lyrics, confronting today’s most pressing issues with grace while paying homage to the musical tradition of the region.

Alex’ characters, though fictional, live and breathe a balance between beauty and imperfection. His stories draw on the triumphs and hardships of friends, relatives, and neighbors near and far, and he has worked tirelessly to carry the music of northern New York to audiences nationwide.

I hope you will join me in celebrating his return!

Robin

“Alex is a wonderful poetic writer who captures words full of meaning, matching them with creative music that creeps quietly into the past at the same time as dancing with the present, and sneaking a peek at the future.”

– Bob Everhart, Country Music News International

“Alex is a natural storyteller with a rich voice who is creating poignant songs rooted in the heritage of his Adirondack home.”

I am catching up on some Daily Show episodes I missed when I was away for a week and I was particularly taken by one of their pieces on the recent Brexit vote. It was interviews with a dozen or so people who had “voter remorse” and explained that they had not expected the “Leave” side to win so felt safe to vote Leave as a protest vote.

I was in Ireland during the vote and saw some of the coverage there with my Irish friends. For a moment I felt like that gave me some “special” knowledge about it because I was “there.” As I saw the coverage here I realized it was much the same. It’s certainly true that the impact on Ireland is orders of magnitude greater than here in the US, but that didn’t mean the coverage was different. It got me thinking once again about the information I use to form opinions.

The Daily Show coverage resonated with me because it fit in with my view of the world. I viewed the “Leave” case as being based on partial truths and lies and appealing to people’s discouragement with government. Much of the coverage I saw, or at least saw and remembered, supported this point of view.

The question I started asking myself was, “What do I really know about the EU and Britain’s relationship with it?” The answer to that is fairly straight forward: I know what I hear on the media streams I choose to glean for information. For me, National Public Radio is my most trusted source of information. I find its coverage “unbiased” but that is only because its biases are in harmony with my biases. Fox News seems biased because the conclusions they arrive at are different than my own and I suspect they report things that aren’t true. To a lesser extent MSNBC and Democracy Now don’t resonate either, but I don’t mistrust their “facts.”

Having said that, I wonder how I came to that conclusion? Did I “fact check” Fox? Probably not, instead I probably heard it fact checked on some other media stream. Do I fact check NPR? No. How does one “fact check” anyway? I’ve never been to Afghanistan or Iraq or Nigeria or even Flint, MI. I can only check “facts” that are reported by someone else. Ultimately we have to use the preponderance of evidence rather than facts, but more often than not, what we believe is based on who we believe.

Fiction (aka lies) aside, there are a vast number of facts and experiences that have relevance to a story and reporters and news curators must make decisions on which ones they report and send on to the audience. Judgments must be made and these result in an inevitable bias. As one journalist once said, “We can never be unbiased; the best we can do is to be ‘fair.’”

More than ever, media covers the “impact” of an event as much as the facts. Mass shootings are covered with interviews with the victims’ families, funerals, the outrage. More than facts this visceral reaction stimulates our emotional reaction. These visceral reactions can lead to good legislation, but Hitler rose to power not on facts but on emotional appeal.

So where does this leave me? First, it leaves me less confident that I know much of anything. To those who know me, this may come as a surprise as I do tend to state my opinions with confidence. I’m a master of self-deception. A mentor once said to me, “You said that with a lot of authority. Are you sure that’s true?” It was a pivotal moment for me. I realized that the less sure I was of something, the more authority I would add to my tone of voice. To this day, I use it as personal BS meter: I’ll say something, hear that tone of authority, and say, “Wait a minute, I take that back. I think I’m extrapolating beyond the data.”

Clearly this revelation has not stopped me from developing opinions. What it has done is help me remember that they are just opinions, not some ultimate truth. I still have trouble reinterpreting facts to allow my opinions to evolve and change, but I’m getting better at it.

Ultimately it’s how this plays out in how I live my life, that’s important. As someone who was once a strident activist, how do I approach controversial issues? Over the last 5 or 6 years I have been teaching (read learning) alternative and renewable energy at SUNY Canton. One of the biggest issues facing the North Country is wind power. At a cursory glance, it’s hard to see what’s not to like; the wind is there, why not use it? It’s not like we are going to slow down the spinning of the earth by adding air resistance (or at least we don’t think so).

However, there are significant issues, both for the community it’s sited in and the environment at large. And then there’s the wind business itself. What determines a person’s opinion about wind is as much how they weight the downsides against the upsides as it is the facts (and fictions) that they believe. One technical method for this weighting is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). It tries to take into account the long term costs of development and weigh them against the benefits. I like this method not because it arrives at some unassailable answer, but because it attempts to look at the big picture and it serves as a model that can take into account new information.

Where does it break down? There are two places: the accuracy and even availability of the data, and how “intangible costs” (like environmental, health and social impacts) are weighted. As wind farms have developed, there is more and more data on things like bird kill, but there is little quantitative data on health and social effects. Recent work on the impact of wind farms on property values, much of it done here in the North Country by Martin Heintzelman and his colleagues at Clarkson University, is starting to paint a picture, but it’s not a static picture.

Health effects, on the other hand, are primarily anecdotal. Another North Country resident, Dr. Nina Pierpont, has written a book on Wind Turbine Syndrome, but the dominant opinion is that health effects are rare. It is unfortunate that no one has seen fit to do a broader epidemiological study of potential health effects because as we know from tobacco, dominant opinions can be catastrophic.

In addition, there are social and economic factors that come into play. What is the value of the viewscape of hundreds of turbines? I can’t imagine getting approval for overhead powerlines today if none existed, but now we take them for granted. Leases are given for a relatively small plot around the base of a tower, but the impact goes far beyond the base and there is no requirement that impacted neighbors be compensated, partially because we haven’t quantified the impacts on them.

Wind power is an emerging industry and, like all other renewables (with the exception of large hydropower), is not competitive with traditional fossil fuels without government subsidies. Without these subsidies, new renewable energy sources wouldn’t develop until the depletion of fossil fuels raised their cost to a point where renewables could compete. Government incentives are designed to fast track the industry and get it competitive long before market forces could, maybe even before the world experiences serious impacts from climate change.

Finally there is the business of wind. Most of the wind power developed in the North Country is being done by Iberdrola, a Spanish company that dominates the wind industry worldwide. As with many controversial developments, these companies are less than transparent and tend to seek a foothold before going public with their plans. They have been accused of clandestine tactics such as offering leases to government leaders even if the potential for wind on that land is minimal. They operate in secrecy, insisting that lease holders sign non-disclosure agreements about what they are paid. All of these things raise red flags.

I’m sure that there are many other factors, some of which may turn out to be much more critical than the preceding inventory, at play. So I’m left with two options: evaluate the scanty evidence, weighted to my biases, and come up with an opinion, or withhold judgment. Opinions, flawed and otherwise, are what shape our future. Not having an opinion is like the “no-action” alternative, it plays a role in shaping the future, too.

At this point, I support wind power in general but there are places where it’s not appropriate. I believe there should be changes in the process of development to address local concerns and openness would go a long way to allow the development of wind in a harmonious and appropriate manner. And I remain open to new facts and new points of view.

Wind power was a good issue for me to use to demonstrate the shift in my process. The progressive faction with which I identify is somewhat split on the issue, so like a good statesman, I am held upright by forces from both sides. On other issues, I have not yet become so pliable. On taxation and the redistribution of wealth, for example, I’m pretty dogmatic, supporting Bernie and Elizabeth Warren without a lot of fact collection and analysis.

I want to leave you with what started this inquiry back in 1974. I was listening to the ZBS radio serial, The Fourth Tower of Inverness, and one of the last parts was a reading of Hsin Hsin Ming. This quote stuck like a grain of sand in my shoe.

“If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.”

After dinner Finbarr took me to see Abby Island. It is no longer an island–the small gap between it and the mainland has been bridged–nor is it still an active Abby, as you can see from the distinct lack of roof. Instead it serves as an active graveyard both inside and outside the walls of the ruined buildings.

This morning Finbarr drove us down to his place in Castle Cove on the Ring of Kerry. It’s what you think of when you think of Ireland but, today anyway, without the rain. What you can’t see in the photo is the seals that are basking on the narrow rock behind the large one.

After lunch we took the kayaks out and paddled out past them to the Kenmare River, really a bay on southeast side of the Iveragh Peninsula that the Ring circumnavigates. When we swung out into the incoming tide, it and the wind carried us back to his front yard where we started.

I’m off to County Cork, sporting my locally made SkySkarf, to visit Finbarr, my graduate school housemate, and Janet, his lovely wife. Since I last saw them in 1985, they’ve lived in Seattle, Berkeley, moved back to Cork, and raised 3 children.

Finbarr is the smartest and most hospitable man I have ever met. If I arrived home while he was eating, there was a plate set for me before I got my coat off. When my brother and I visited him and has parents in 1983, they took my to his brother Dhiarmuid’s house in Kerry where they took us around the bay by boat. When he had to return to Madison, his friend and family continued to take us around and would, no doubt, have continued to host us had we not attempted to hitchhike to Galway…but that’s another story.

Quartet Z are

Music by
Fasch, Gershwin, Pärt,
Schickele, Wolfe
and premiering a composition by
Paul Steinberg

Saturday, May 14, 4:00 pm
at the home of Robin McClellan

You may remember these fine musicians from last year, performing then as the Unnamed Quartet. I’m looking forward to having them return again this year, now christened Quartet Z. I understand why they have chosen the enigmatic name Quartet Z, as describing their music is virtually impossible.I can tell you though, that they create some of the most beautiful and interesting music you will every hear.

I hope you will join me for this benefit for the Music Friends of Potsdam Central Schools.

Sunday, March 6
2 PM
Robin McClellan’s

I hope you will join me to help celebrate the imminent release of Mary Ann Casale’s newest CD, Restless Heart.

This concert is close to my heart. I remember listening to Mary Ann in the seventies, in the days of the Wild Oat and Django’s (two legendary establishments that brought great music to Potsdam). She set aside performing in public for 30 years and only started writing songs and performing again a few years ago. Even with her talent, it takes a lot of courage and strength to swim in today’s current of talented local musicians all vying for space on the stage. But she is a musician’s musician and has benefited from the support of many local performers who she plays regularly with. Key among them is international bluesman and producer of this CD, Tas Cru, who will join her for the release.

Once again she is doing this as benefit for the local Food Pantry. I always find it terribly ironic that hunger is as much an issue in this agricultural area as it is in cities, but it is. Equally ironic is that it is starving musicians who volunteer to help raise money for food pantries. It’s difficult to compete for money with the presidential candidates and national causes, whose ubiquitous fundraising emails crowd our inboxes, so food pantries, with no budget for real fundraising, can’t keep up with the needs.